Overall conclusion, misty air around the falls makes for pretty blah photography in general. My favorites out of this set are definitely the macro shots of the flowers. There are a few interesting angles thrown in from when I was able to snap a quick shot between attempts to quickly remove the water from the lens filters.

Also, I’m noticing that the crud on my imager is finally reaching intolerable levels. I’ve been avoiding buying another bottle of Eclipse because it’s such a ripoff to pay $9 shipping on an $9 2-ounce bottle of methanol (half of which will evaporate between uses). Unfortunately, methanol is considered a controlled substance from a shipping to random civilians point of view. Otherwise I could buy very high purity stuff directly from a chem supply house for a fraction of the unit cost.

No time to comment as I’ve already missed too much sleep tonight trying to get stuff wrapped up before the Dragon*Con trek.

If you have interest in photography, or the impact of new media on traditional media (newspaper, magazines), you’ll find his blog interesting. He’s just getting started as a blogger, but it looks like he’s on the right track to explore an interesting niche. He seems to recognize that while opportunities seem to be fading for the traditional ’staff photographer’, considerably more freedom and opportunity is available working directly for your audience (us!).

To share one tidbit, in a posting after his return from Beijing he posts:

In Beijing, with a total of 6 cameras, I shot: 28,444 files for a total of a whopping 480 Gigabytes of Images! That’s INSANE! Even I am shocked.

I thought my photography archive was getting out of control. I’m just pushing that many images in my entire career at a third of the storage space.

Wow.

It took us about 2 hours to wait in line with the other cars for about 60 seconds with the border agent. What are we doing with all of the delay if the search is so cursory? I can only assume that somebody is getting the nth degree. The question, of course, is: Is it the right somebody?

Anyway, this sign says it all:

So the whole point is that today is the 2nd anniversary of Pluto’s official demotion from the arbitrary astronomical classification “planet”. I’m not going to get into the pseudo-political world of why this is arbitrary or whether it’s particularly significant in any particular way, what I am going to say is:

Pluto is small.

Really freaking small.

Or at least really freaking small relative to anything else that we have come to know and love as a planet. According to NASA, Pluto is 1422 miles (2288 km) in diameter. So although I wouldn’t want to personally walk its entire 4467 mile circumference in one trip, it’s easy to fly that far without leaving this planet. In fact, in my flights to and from Australia, I traveled over three times that far (more if the trans-American legs are included). Granted, Oz is pretty far away in Earth terms, but can we really respect an astronomical body that can be circumnavigated in half a day by a commercial airliner? Mercury is now the smallest planet with a circumference of over 9500 miles (15000 km). Check out this graphical planet size comparison widget.

It’s not just that Pluto is smaller than our Moon, but because it’s 8 bajillion* miles (13 bajillion** km) away it’s absolutely ridiculously hard to see. In preparation for this post, I decided to pull up my handy free home planetarium software, HNSKY, and see if Pluto is actually visible. Not that I expected to walk outside, point to the sky and say “there’s Pluto”, but I thought there might be some remote possibility that I could capture it in a picture. It IS technically in the sky right now, not far from Jupiter in the sky (about 15 degrees to the right at the time of publication: 00:01 EDT). The problem is that (according to the software) Pluto is about magnitude 13.9. Do you have any sense for how many objects in the sky are brighter than that? No? Take a look at the picture below. It is the area around Jupiter and Pluto that you might see with the naked eye on a clear summer night with stars to magnitude 6 shown. Pluto should not be visible, but is marked with a small green dot and two lines.

One could reasonably argue that this is a better sky than most people will ever see, but it doesn’t matter, because THIS is what the sky would look like if you could see everything up to and including Pluto.

Obviously, you can see that the software has sort-of broken down for this many stars… and in fact, seems to only be displaying stars up to 11th magnitude. Click on the picture to see a larger rendering of this same piece of sky. My point is that even if you COULD see Pluto, you probably WOULDN’T see Pluto because it would be lost in the jumble of the other million objects in the sky which are brighter than it is. Which of course means that even if I could point my camera at the right piece of sky, AND get a few hundred thousand photons*** to travel from the Sun AND bounce off Pluto AND end up in my lens it would take a significant effort to determine which one of the non-black pixel dots contained Plutonian photons.
For reference, the two dimmest planets are Uranus and Neptune at approximate visual magnitudes of 5.7 and 7.8 respectively. So even though Uranus is within the range of human perception it wasn’t documented as discovered until 1781 AD. It was simply another dot lost in the background noise, and moved too slowly to appear to be changing in the sky.

So Pluto, we salute thee, even though you’re small and dim and probably deserved to not quite rank with the eight remaining Solar planets. The good news is that you seem to have plenty of siblings in this new realm of astronomical bodies.

Check out the rest of the Plutopia blog fest at the Evil Eyebrow.

There are, as always, a lot more pictures than I’ve posted, but I think these are the highlights. In general, the pictures didn’t come out as well as I hoped. The hall was a typical tile drop ceiling with sparse florescent lighting. This makes for high ISOs, slow shutter speeds and weird color casts.

Anyhow, we did a series of family shots of the various guests, so I’ll close with those.

Keep it up guys!!

In any case, here are some more pics from Rosamond Gifford Zoo.

Egads! No… with the camera of course.

I’ve put all the pictures that are even halfway decent in the gallery. Many did not come out as well as I hoped, but I got better as I went along. So if you happened to be a slower rider, it’s more likely that your picture came out and made it into the gallery. As best as I could, I included the racer’s number in the image description, so if you’re looking for a particular picture you can search for your number. Of course, as I said, many of the pictures were blurry so make sure to search on reasonable variations on your number. (like 356 => 366 or 365 or maybe even 388).

There were over 400 competitors, and there are only about 170 pictures, so obviously I didn’t get even close to everybody. If you are a racer, or family/friend, etc. and you want a picture, just let me know and I’ll send you a copy without the watermark on it. No charge, I just want credit.

Some of my favorites:

I’m trying to watch the women’s fencing from last night and your choices are basically watch it or not. There is a slider that might theoretically allow you to move around in the broadcast. Just like in Media Player, the slider is about 3 inches long, this wouldn’t be a big problem if the broadcast weren’t 3+ hours long. So the smallest adjustment in the slider is about 7-10 minutes. How hard would it be to have a finer adjustment?

Oh, and as expected, you’re forced to watch a commercial before the viewer actually goes active to watch the event itself.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain TOO much, after all, I wouldn’t be able to see any events other than gymnastics, swimming and basketball if it weren’t for the online feed.

Amusing note: The theme from The Rock was playing in the background before the first bout.